Best of 2017: Best Fiction Books

We continue our “Best of 2017″ series curated by the entire CCM-Entropy community and present some of our favorite selections as nominated by the diverse staff and team here at Entropy, as well as nominations from our readers.

This list brings together some of our favorite fiction books published in 2017.

(For last year’s list, click here.)

In no particular order…

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1. Isadora by Amelia Gray (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

A stunning meditation on art and grief by one of America’s most exciting young authors . . . Gray is a gutsy, utterly original writer, and this is the finest work she’s done so far. Isadora is a masterful portrait of one of America’s greatest artists, and it’s also a beautiful reflection on what it means to be suffocated by grief, but not quite willing to give up. —Michael Schaub, NPR.org

2. The Book of Joan by Lidia Yuknavitch (Harper)

Brilliant and incendiary. . . . Radically new, full of maniacal invention and page-turning momentum. . . .Yuknavitch has exhibited a rare gift for writing that concedes little in its quest to be authentic, meaningful and relevant. By adding speculative elements to The Book of Joan, she reaches new heights with even higher stakes: the death or life of our planet.  — Jeff VanderMeer,

3. Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward (Scribner)

However eternal its concerns, Sing, Unburied, Sing, Ward’s new book, is perfectly poised for the moment. It combines aspects of the American road novel and the ghost story with a timely treatment of the long aftershocks of a hurricane and the opioid epidemic devouring rural America. —The New York Times

4. Exit West by Moshin Hamid (Riverhead Books)

Hamid exploits fiction’s capacity to elicit empathy and identification to imagine a better world. It is also a possible world. Exit West does not lead to utopia, but to a near future and the dim shapes of strangers that we can see through a distant doorway. All we have to do is step through it and meet them. —Viet Thanh Nguyen

5. Sour Heart by Jenny Zhang (Lenny)

In her book Sour Heart, Jenny Zhang arrives as a Chinese-American voice we haven’t heard yet. . . . The specificity and intense focus of her writing lends itself . . . to the stories in Sour Heart—to the different forms of fear and violence within its pages; the joys and thrills and cruelties traded among young girls; the way emotions and memories are transmitted across generations; how language—and its deficits—structure experience. —W Magazine

6. The Changeling by Victor LaValle (Spiegel & Grau)

Victor LaValle’s fabulist ode to fatherhood and fairy tales offers a new take on themes as old as time. . . . Throughout western mythology, white men with swords have been the heroes while the rest of us watch, oohing and aahing, from the sidelines. With his genre-bending novel, The Changeling, Victor LaValle updates the epic narrative for the twenty-first century. —O: The Oprah Magazine

7. The Complete Stories of Leonora Carrington by Leonora Carrington (Dorothy, A Publishing Project)

Leonora Carrington has unswervingly followed the intensity of her own particular vision and way of being . . . Her work bristles with a fierce, unconventional brand of feminism; anger gives it its final edge of irony and power. —Angela Carter

8. Down Below by Leonora Carrington (NYRB)

In her centenary year, Carrington is undergoing a revival…Down Below is both a recollection of madness and a kind of transcription. Though Carrington completed it after the fact, her memoir hews closely to her thoughts and feelings as they were then. —Anwen Crawford, The New Yorker

9. Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders (Random House)

There are moments that are almost transcendentally beautiful, that will come back to you on the edge of sleep. And it is told in beautifully realized voices, rolling out with precision or with stream-of-consciousness drawl. —NPR

10. Motherest by Kristen Iskandrian (Twelve)

One of the most unforgettable protagonists I’ve read in recent years – as if a Dickens heroine was reimagined by a literary girl gang made up of Deb Olin Unferth, Katherine Dunn and Lydia Davis. ―Porochista Khakpour

11. No One Can Pronounce My Name by Rakesh Satyal (Picador)

This story of trying to find one’s way in a new country, and through grief, beautifully extracts and distills every single emotion. Readers will finish wanting more. ―Rolling Stone

12. The Dark Dark: Stories by Samantha Hunt (FSG Originals)

The Dark Dark . . . wields such a subtle and alien power that I couldn’t read more than a couple of pieces in a sitting without feeling like some witchy substance was working its way through my blood . . . Wonderfully spooky. ―Jia Tolentino, The New Yorker

13. The Red Barn by Nat Baldwin (Calamari Press)

The blades, the rust, the dirt, the mouth, the meat, the blood, the sun, the glass, the skin, the word, the lake, the graves; it’s a pristine and elemental form of fiction that Nat Baldwin renders, distilling language and image to its most primal animation. Like seeing slides of color pass before your face in darkness. Like remembering how to read.—Blake Butler

14. Silk Flowers by Meghan Lamb (Birds of Lace)

A poetry of the body these words—a meticulous meditation. With a full control of voice and tone, Meghan Lamb captures the complexities of illness, on relationships, on memory, on the disappearing self, the lonely isolation of an altered state. A serious and elegant book. —Sean Lovelace

15. The Disintegrations by Alistair McCartney (University of Wisconsin Press)

A book that takes possession of you right from the opening and will not let you go. Challenging and gripping, a rumination on death and memory that speaks eloquently to our sense of loss, both personal and communal. The writing is exquisite. In the best possible sense, I know this book will haunt me for the longest time. —Christos Tsiolka

16. The Protester Has Been Released by Janet Sarbanes (C&R Press)

Exploring the subtle and not-so-subtle disjunctions between the so-called animal and the so-called human world, between police and citizens, between the president and its electorate, between rich and poor, and between humans and the world,The Protester Has Been Released is a funny, humane, and scalpel-sharp collection. Only after you finish do you realize how close these worlds are to our own, and how implicated you are. —Brian Evenson

17. Sorry to Disrupt the Peace by Patty Yumi Cottrell (McSweeney’s)    

Patty Yumi Cottrell’s prose does so many of my favorite things—some too subtle to talk about without spoiling, but one thing I have to mention is the way in which her heroine’s investigation of a suicide draws the reader right into the heart of this wonderfully spiky hedgehog of a book and then elbows us yet further along into what is ultimately a tremendously moving act of imagination. —Helen Oyeyemi

18. The Golden House by Salman Rushdie (Random House)

[A] modern masterpiece . . . Every once in a while you stumble upon a book that transports you, telling a story full of wonder and leaving you marveling at how it ever came out of the author’s head. The Golden House is one of those books. . . . [It] tackles more than a handful of universal truths while feeling wholly original. —The Associated Press

19. Made for Love by Alissa Nutting (Ecco)

Smart, riveting … The book begins, and races along, as an antic thriller…Made for Love crackles and satisfies by all its own weird rules, subversively inventing delight where none should exist. How can a book be so bright, and so dark? —New York Times Book Review

20. The Complete Ballet by John Haskell (Graywolf Press)

The Complete Ballet is a very absorbing, even thrilling, novel. . . . Haskell’s achievement lies in both the sustained emotional stakes of his book and in the fruitful experiment in adaptation and ekphrasis. —New Republic

21. Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado (Graywolf Press)

The book abounds with fantastical premises that ring true because the intensity of sexual desire, the mutability of the body, and the realities of gender inequality make them so. . . . These stories stand as exquisitely rendered, poignant hauntings. —San Francisco Chronicle

22. Homesick for Another World by Ottessa Moshfegh (Penguin Press)

Ottessa Moshfegh’s story collection, “Homesick for Another World,” couldn’t come at a better time. Notions of class and power are in an unpredictable flux. A new elite rises, flipping the deck into the air. Nobody knows where the cards will land. So here comes Moshfegh, whose imaginative writing about train-wreck characters, rich and poor, adheres to a relentlessly dim worldview where a divided America comes together in the muck . . . The best stories in the collection, however, contain memorable, conflicting images of squalor and beauty, chaos and pattern. —Associated Press

23. Tales of Falling and Flying by Ben Loory (Penguin Books)

Short stories so imaginative — and yet so perplexingly familiar — they could have formed in a dream. . . . Taut, meticulously balanced and written in Loory’s direct, witty prose, his own stories take a page from Aesop: high-flying tales nonetheless boiled down to the essentials. —The Los Angeles Times

24. Sonata In K by Karen An-Hwei Lee (Ellipsis Press)

What writer doesn’t pledge allegiance to Kafka? That’s why it’s astonishing when a writer comes along and actually makes Franz new, as does Karen An-hwei Lee, through her effervescent playfulness, richness of imagination, musicality, her endlessly inventive polyglot sensibility. Lee resides intimately in the space between languages, geographies, and temporalities as she pays homage to the master, as well as homage to the act of writing, of translation, of reading. The verbal and the sensual are fused under her supple pen, and you will marvel at her capacity to animate words, releasing them from habit and predictability into buoyancy. —Mary Caponegro

25. Enfermario by Gabriela Torres Olivares (trans. Jennifer Donovan) (Les Figues Press)

Gabriela Torres Olivares is one of my favorite living writers; her sentences are devastating, beautiful, utterly desired, and then, are like the skin that needs to be shed off in cycles. After all, we are reptilian. The words are wounds and portals, and her narratives somehow puncture into the heart of what it means to be a human among other humans, monstrous, touching, apparitions of each other and of the disappearing myths that are still embedded in our bloodstream. The stories in Enfermario exist somehow as the sediment for our current condition, as the evidence of our sad secrets, and as the inflections of our uncanny and everyday cognition. —Janice Lee

26. The Secret Room by Kazim Ali (Kaya Press)

In Kazim Ali’s wildly inventive novel THE SECRET ROOM, written as musical score for a string quartet, he asks: How does one create a life of meaning in the face of loneliness and alienation from one’s own family, culture, or even sense of self? During the space of one single day, the lives of four people converge and diverge in ways they themselves may not even measure.

27. The Ladies by Sara Veglahn (Noemi Press)

The Ladies reads like a fever dream you wake from hungrily and fall to feasting–fall to dreaming again, hoping to return to the birds and the buckets, to rain and stones and confusions of being, to the marvelously muddied frontier between the living and the dead. Sara Veglahn gives us a lush, thingy, ethereal world all her very own.  —Noy Holland

28. The Idiot by Elif Batuman (Penguin Press)

Batuman’s brainy novel is leavened with humor and a heroine incapable of artifice. —People

29. The Leavers by Lisa Ko (Algonquin Books)

This wrenching and all-too-topical debut novel picks up the life of an 11-year-old American-born boy on the day his mother, an undocumented Chinese immigrant, disappears . . . Ko uses the voices of both the boy and his birth mother to tell a story that unfolds in graceful, realistic fashion and defies expectations. —Janet Maslin, New York Times

30. Genevieves by Henry Hoke (Subito Press)

Henry Hoke pushes the button on literary convention in this fierce and funny collection. GENEVIEVES is a weapon of mass re-creation that will take you to the highest point in the haunted levels of language. —Elisabeth Sheffield

31. Frontier by Can Xue (trans. Karen Gernant) (Open Letter Books)

This ambitious book aspires to refashion the Chinese language to explore interiority and subjectivity, establish transnational authorship, and enter the conversation of world literature. ―Yun Ni, Harvard Review Online

32. Assisted Living by Gary Lutz (Scout Book Series, Future Tense)

Gary Lutz is a revolutionary force in American writing, reinventing prose fiction with sentences that always deliver on their extravagant promises. –Sam Lipsyte

33. The Grip of It by Jac Jemc (FSG Originals)

A page-turning psychological thriller . . . [The Grip of It] is the clever work of a writer who has patiently carved out her own home in contemporary fiction . . . as chilling as it is evocative. ―Laura Pearson, Chicago Tribune

34. The Golden Cockerel & Other Writings by Juan Rulfo (trans. Douglas J. Weatherford) (Deep Vellum)

To read Rulfo’s stories is to inhabit Mexico and, in the process, to have Mexico inhabit you. ―Oscar Casares, NPR

35. Not One Day by Anne Garréta (trans. Emma Ramadan) (Deep Vellum)

Although the book swerves briefly into the erotic, the majority of the text is a heady meditation. Where we expect to find a confession of the body, we are in fact met with a confession of the mind, as Garréta laments the imposition of hetero normative gender roles upon queer desire. This leaves the reader with another question: how can we invent alternate ways to express desire outside of hetero dichotomy? ―Liz von Klemperer, Lambda Literary

36. An Occasional History by Laura Davenport (Sagging Meniscus Press)

Laura Davenport’s poetic and harrowing AN OCCASIONAL HISTORY investigates how language and a person’s place within it come to be defined in the context of an abusive relationship—one whose terrible violence is ever so gradually revealed, as layers of language and forgetting are progressively peeled away. Through five sections of differing form, in which romance novels, the OED, and etymological histories play prominent roles, we approach the core of knowledge step by step, and come to experience not merely abuse and its ramifications, but the central role in it of how language is shaped by power relations, and vice versa.

37. The Truth About Me by Louise Marburg (WTAW Press)

38. The Week by Joanna Ruocco (The Elephants)

THE WEEK presents models of minds shaped by the 21st century American realities that they also construct. The stories are unconventional in their arcs and uses of characterization, and in their foregrounding of the instabilities in representational practices; they obsess over life and death, female sexuality and family, the economy and language and try out various forms inadequate to their figuration/expression.

39. Houses of Ravicka by Renee Gladman (Dorothy, A Publishing Project)

The Ravikian novels exalt the primacy of language to further imaginative possibility, which dominant and oppressive regimes would shut down. Gladman’s writing cleaves to the luminous. It slips through the gaps in our thinking to pluralise, queer, subvert, and mobilise. These books are strange but, through a bright and deft poetic obliquity, they shine an incomparable light onto our contemporary moment. —The White Review

40. New People by Danzy Senna (Riverhead Books)

[Senna] explore[s] what happens when races and cultures mingle in the home — and under the skin…Her new novel, the sinister and charming New People, riffs on the themes she’s made her own — with a twist. It’s a novel that reads us. It anticipates, and sidesteps, lazy reading and sentimental expectations… The material is hot but the style stays cool… Senna’s aim is precise and devastating…There is no easy consolation in New People. But in its insistence on being read on its own terms, its commitment to complexity, it does something better than describe freedom. It enacts it. —New York Times

41. Before Everything by Victoria Redel (Viking)

Redel’s novel about longtime friends who come together to care for one of their own—and relive a lifetime of memories—proves why ‘before everything’ is where we ought to place friendship on the roster of the most soul-satisfying things. —Redbook

42. Wait Till You See Me Dance by Deb Olin Unferth (Graywolf Press)

[Unferth’s] absurd and tender story collection is full of sentences like clear glass doors, and you, reader, are the bird. . . . The way she writes [her characters] is reminiscent of the unsentimental, often absurd, compassion of George Saunders. . . . The multiplicity of feeling is wonderful; it’s like she’s swirling all these different colors of paint together but stops while it’s all still just thinly marbled together. —NPR

43. Home Fire by Kamila Shamsie (Riverhead Books)

[A] haunting novel, full of dazzling moments and not a few surprising turns…Home Fire blazes with the kind of annihilating devastation that transcends grief. —Washington Post

44.The World Goes On by László Krasznahorkai (New Directions)

Krasznahorkai’s fiction is apocalyptic in the original sense: concerned with the time when ordinary, blinkered perception gives way to revelation, when the veil is rent and we see things in their true and terrifying form. The World Goes On, a collection of 20 short stories plus a coda, serves as a wonderful primer to the ‘invisible gigasystem’ that is the Krasznahorkai universe. —Boston Globe

45. Stephen Florida by Gabe Habash (Coffee House Press)

What a strange, strange, utterly intriguing novel… Writing like this takes guts. —Roxane Gay

46. Empty Set by Verónica Gerber Bicecci (trans. Christina MacSweeney) (Coffee House Press)

Verónica Gerber writes with a luminous intimacy; her novel is clever, vibrant, moving, profoundly original. Reading it made me feel as if the world had been rebuilt. —Francisco Goldman

47. My Heart Hemmed In by Marie NDiaye (trans. Jordan Stump) (Two Lines Press)

My Heart Hemmed In thoroughly consumes the reader with its lovely, spooky language . . . Like Samanta Schweblin’s Fever Dream, it generates both a sense of mounting unease and a pleasurable desire to learn just what, exactly, has gone so wrong. ―Caite Dolan-Leach

48. Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng (Penguin Press)

I read Little Fires Everywhere in a single, breathless sitting. With brilliance and beauty, Celeste Ng dissects a microcosm of American society just when we need to see it beneath the microscope:  how do questions of race stack up against the comfort of privilege, and what role does that play in parenting?  Is motherhood a bond forged by blood, or by love?  And perhaps most importantly:  do the faults of our past determine what we deserve in the future?  Be ready to be wowed by Ng’s writing — and unsettled by the mirror held up to one’s own beliefs. —Jodi Picoult

49. Buckskin Cocaine by Erika T. Wurth (Astrophil Press)

This is the raw stuff, the loud stuff, the hard stuff, the true stuff. It’ll infect you in a way you won’t realize at first, too. Not until days later, when you can’t remember if you read this or you lived it. Trust me: you did both. — Stephen Graham Jones

50. Man’s Wars & Wickedness by Amanda Ackerman & Harold Abramowitz (Bon Aire Projects)

Man’s Wars and Wickedness is a high drama set in “the healthiest region in all Europe.” A county of rolling hills and crooning cherry trees. A land irrevocably shaped by the great war in its past, its future. Herein lies the drama… Virtuosic, Man’s Wars and Wickedness swerves between narrative voices and forms, offering the reader a rash of  mysteries to explore: who is the true bad guy? Is the world really ending? What language can I trust? In this sense, Man’s Wars and Wickedness is a necessary book for our times. — Elizabeth Hall

51. Large Animals by Jess Arndt (Catapult) 

Jess Arndt’s Large Animals is wildly original, even as it joins in with the classics of loaded, outlaw literature. Acerbic, ecstatic, hilarious, psychedelic, and affecting in turn, this is an electric debut. ―Maggie Nelson

52. Is God Is by Aleshea Harris (3 Hole Press)

A rigorous new work that unearths our deepest fears about humanity and who we think we are in relation to ourselves and the divine. —Dawn Lundy Martin

53. Pachinko by Min Jin Lee (Grand Central Publishing)

Stunning… Despite the compelling sweep of time and history, it is the characters and their tumultuous lives that propel the narrative… A compassionate, clear gaze at the chaotic landscape of life itself. In this haunting epic tale, no one story seems too minor to be briefly illuminated. Lee suggests that behind the facades of wildly different people lie countless private desires, hopes and miseries, if we have the patience and compassion to look and listen. ―The New York Times Book Review

54. Modern Love by Constance DeJong (Ugly Duckling Presse)

In the 1970s, Constance DeJong’s Modern Love played a critical role in Downtown’s invention of post-modernism. How?  By transporting us to other states of being, we got to visit Soho, Elizabethan England, and India.  Why is this book considered part of the visual art world?  Because everyone was doing everything — and Modern Love exactly captured its time. —Martha Wilson

55. Things We Lost in the Fire by Mariana Enríquez (Hogarth)

Enriquez’s stories are historically aware and class-conscious, but her characters never avail themselves of sentimentalism or comfort. She’s after a truth more profound, and more disturbing, than whatever the strict dictates of realism allow….[P]ropulsive and mesmerizing, laced with vivid descriptions of the grotesque…and the darkest humor. —New York Times Book Review

56. Notes of A Crocodile by Qiu Miaojin (trans. Bonnie Huie) (NYRB)

Billed as a cult classic and crafted with a unique mix of notes, diary entries, short scenes, and satire, this updated translation will shed more light on the work of a renowned but little-known author. —Sara Novic, Elle

57. Ice by Anna Kavan (50th Anniversary Edition) (Penguin Classics)

One might become convinced that Kavan had seen the future . . . A half century after its first appearance, Kavan’s fever dream of a novel is beginning to seem all too real. –The New Yorker

58. Writers Who Love Too Much: New Narrative Writing 1977-1997 Edited by Dodie Bellamy & Kevin Killian (Nightboat Books)

In their new anthology, Writers Who Love Too Much: New Narrative 1977–1997, editors Bellamy and Killian gather what they consider the first generation of New Narrative writing—though in keeping with the movement’s suspicion of linear, coherent narratives, they are quick to shrug at this marker. Formed in the late 1970s in San Francisco, New Narrative was a transgressive, queer-leaning, self- and body-obsessed literary avant-garde that took shape in part against the dominance of anti-narrative, self-evacuating Language poetry at the time. Combining the confessional with the conceptual, it experimented with the possibilities of loosely autobiographical storytelling to produce an exploded and unstable “I.” Gossipy and uninhibited, its breath is hot in your ear. It wants to tell you everything, and it wants you to overshare back. —M. Milks

59. The Passion of Woo & Isolde by Jennifer Tseng (Rose Metal Press)

THE PASSION OF WOO & ISOLDE scintillates with the thrall of the unknown and the forbidden, the immigrant and the exile. In each of these twenty-four very short fictions, novelist and poet Jennifer Tseng explores the limits and limitlessness of our ability to see. A museum worker meets her wife from a previous life in the form of a security guard; a mouse believes she and a lion share a covenant; newlyweds who speak two different languages make love without understanding one another. With its host of unforgettable characters, the collection accumulates into a work of elegance and daring from a writer whose intuitive leaps and emotional intelligence make her one of the most compelling voices writing across genres today.

60. A Small Revolution by Jimin Han (Little A)

A Small Revolution is a novel of remarkably rendered extremes.…It is an ambitious and accomplished debut that pulls us out of our comfortable window seats and places us in a room, in a young woman’s heart, and in a nascent democracy’s earliest days. —Los Angeles Review of Books